Opportunity Knocks

By
Friday, 13 February 2009

Opportunity Knocks

Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day. Our relatively small team of 29 employees has accomplished quite a bit lately but it’s obvious that we have the world ahead of us.

An Offer We Couldn’t Refuse

We weren’t actively seeking more funding because significant capital from last year’s partnership with Bijan and his team at Spark is still in the bank. Nevertheless, our strong growth attracted interest and we decided to accept a unique opportunity to make Twitter even stronger with a very attractive offer.

Last night, we closed on funding with our friends Peter Fenton from Benchmark and Todd Chaffee from Institutional Venture Partners. When Ev and I visited IVP we were very impressed and Benchmark’s approach regarding teamwork was equally inspiring—every partner is invested in each others success. Peter will be joining our board of directors which means we gain his experience and savvy in addition to that of all his partners.

Big Plans for Twitter, Inc.

We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products. Throughout this year and beyond, our small team will grow much bigger to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Twitter is making a real impact around the world as people, companies, and organizations everywhere discover a powerful new way to communicate and find out what’s happening—right now. With these new partnerships and this new funding, we are in a position to move more confidently toward our vision for a robust and successful Twitter, Inc.